Category Archives: How-to

Homemade Pasta

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The ingredients for homemade past are very simple.
2 Cups flour (wheat or white)
2 Eggs
Some water

period

that is all!


Dump your flour onto the counter or whatever surface you would like to use
it is best if it is a clean surface
nothing is yuckier than grit in your pasta

Make a fun little volcano and crack your two eggs into it.

Then starting on the outside work the flour and the eggs together with your hands


I recommend taking your rings off….my wedding ring still hasn’t recovered from the eggy flour mixture.

This is what it will look like when the eggs and flour are combined, it will be a dry crumbly mess.
This is where the water comes in.

Add water about a Tablespoon at a time until you get a very dry, very stiff dough. The amount of water you use will vary each time depending on many factors.


Kneed and mix everything together really well

Once the dough looks like this let it rest on the counter top (or surface of your choice.) for 10 to 30 minutes, covering it with a damp cloth.


While the dough is “resting” (whatever that means) set up your pasta maker.

If you are simple like me it will be of the hand-crank variety

(which preforms wonderfully)
or an electric one.

and set it to the biggest setting, where the rollers are as far apart as they will go.

Once your dough has had a nice nap cut it into fourths, it it easier to work with. Cover the pieces that you aren’t working with with your damp cloth so they don’t dry out too much.

Moosh your piece out kind of flat….

and push it through the roller

After the first pass through the machine it will look like this and you will think you are a pasta-making-failure, but don’t despair, this is a normal step.


Gather it all together and fold it as best as you can and give it another pass through the machine.

When it starts sticking together well, adjust the pasta maker to a lower setting (so the rollers are closer together)

Fold the dough up and make some more passes

All you do now is fold and run through the machine….adjust down…..and fold and run.

Very Simple.

(look how bad I am, that is some uncovered dough in the back ground! tisk-tisk!)

(and if this happens during one of the passes, don’t fret, it will iron itself out)

Keep going until it is at its smallest setting, or until you are at the thickness you like.

Lay the big sheet of pasta out on the counter top…(or surface of choice) and rest (there is that word again) for about thirty minutes.


When you are ready to cut the pasta put on the attachment of your choice. (At this time I only have two, but that will be changing!) and cut the big sheets of pasta to the length desired. I was making mine for Chicken Noodle soup, so I only wanted them about three inches long. I used a pizza cutter and quickly make the cuts.


Then you just feed it through the cutter and (taadaa) pasta!

This recipe will make two pounds of pasta.

I love that big fat pile!

(I am not so much loving the small pile that made its way to the floor, not my surface of choice)

and a quick picture of the living room without laundry all over
(just give it a couple days…)

I divided the pasta into two piles, one for the soup and one for the freezer.

I haven’t learned how to dry pasta yet, but when I do I will be sure to tell y’all

(Kristi the “y’all” is for you!)

Into the soup pot it goes and since it is fresh it only takes about 5 minutes to cook, and onto the dinner table.

YUM!


No more dried, store bought pasta for this family.

Beans, Beans….

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About a year ago when I decided that we needed to live a more sustainable life I took a serious look at beans. Bean are a wonderful food. They are full of nutrients, and combined with rice are a complete protein. They store really, really well and best of all they are cheap!

There was one catch…

Ok,

well,
two catches….

First, I didn’t know how to cook beans. I had, up to that point, only used canned beans from the store, on the rare occasions that I used beans.
Second, I didn’t think we would really like them.

So I came to two decisions: #1 I needed to learn how to cook beans, my pioneer mothers knew how and I needed to relearn this skill. #2 I needed to learn to like beans, I needed to try recipes and serve them to my family often enough that they go use to them and eventually like them.

So for about a year now I have been searching and cooking and learning all about beans. We have had our share of crunchy beans for dinner (bleck), my family has been wonderful patient with me (at least Dadzoo has, he is really good at tolerating, with a smile, my mess ups).

I thought I would share what I have learned with everybody. In times of plenty and times of famine knowing how to cook from scratch is an invaluable skill. I can have 1,000 pounds of kidney beans in my basement, but they are worthless to me if I don’t know how to prepare them and serve them. Also, I believe, that a time of crisis is not the time to be learning these skills, we should prepare ourselves, not only in the storing of food but the skills to use them the best way possible. Our families need to be use to eating these foods, a time of famine or emergency is not the time to be teaching a 10 year old to love beans! I have a series of posts I am going to be doing in the coming weeks, with some recipes and some tips I have learned along the way.

First of all I would like to show you all how I cook beans. I do a large batch and freeze the beans for later use. This is really convenient and easy, especially if I am running behind, it takes about 5 minutes to grab a bag of beans and defrost it in some warm water.

I start out with 6 cups beans. I am not picky on what type, (I have used Great Northern, Kidney and Black, in various combinations) Today I picked Great Northern and Kidney. I measured the beans and put it in my crock pot.

I fill the crock pot up to the very tip-top with water (about 12-14 cups)

I add salt, pepper and any other spice, a tiny bit of hot pepper is yummy too. (just a note, I have heard that salt and onions make the beans cook slower, when I do the crock pot method I don’t worry about that, we will be cooking these babies for about 10 hours so it doesn’t really matter.)

A handful of dried onions, fresh work too.

Two cloves of garlic, I just peel and cut them in half (I don’t mince garlic, ever) they cook down into nothing anyway.

Give it all a quick stir

Cover and cook on low over night or up to 12 hours.

This is what it looks like the next morning, all cooked with almost no water left. The beans are perfectly soft without being mushy.

I dump it all into a big colander and rinse it really well (that will help keep the gas down)

I measure 4 cups and put it into Ziploc bags and freeze. It makes about 16 cups of cooked beans.

This bowl was set aside for dinner that night, and the next recipe in the series….Bean Taco Bake…one of my family’s favorite meals.

Herbs

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I have always had herbs growing my garden, and I sort of, kind of used them. In the summertime mostly I would go pick them occasionally to go in a dish or something. When I decided that I wanted to try to have a more self sufficient life I took a hard look at my gardening and my herbs. I was wasting the good herbs in my garden and buy them from the store. Not very self sufficient or frugal. So this summer I decided I was going to harvest, dry and store herbs for use during the winter. This is the first time I have done this, so it is still a bit of an experiment. I don’t have a lot that can be stored and used for cooking, but next year I plan to add more herbs to my garden.
I have two little patched of Chamomile, one of these I just planted new this year. As long as you keep the flowers harvested they will bloom all summer. I like this plant because it is so pretty, it blends in easily with bedding plants.

That little bushy thing is some coconut thyme. It really doesn’t taste like coconut, it just had a little white variegation on the leaves. I would have rather harvested “Mother of Thyme”, but for some reason those plants didn’t do well this year, so I decided to leave them alone. I love Thyme, there are so many different varieties (the creeping thyme is only used as an ornamental plant) and they are so beautiful in a landscape.


That is Sage. I like to harvest the top leaves that are small and tender. There are many different varieties of Sage also, they are beautiful as regular landscape plantings too.


Good old Parsley. I have gotten tons of this bush.

This is Basil. I don’t use Basil very much, I really should learn how. Basil is a very tender plant and doesn’t stand up to cold weather very well at all. A light frost will kill it dead. Needless to say, this is not a perennial in Utah.


This is a handful of Chamomile blossoms I just harvested. I drink a lot of Chamomile tea in the winter and I was hoping to get enough to support my habit, but I didn’t. Next year when the new plant is in full bloom I will do better. This winter I am going to crush them and add them to homemade soap along with some Lavender I got out of my yard this June.

I laid them all out on my back steps on top of a clean flour sack towel. I covered them with another towel and weighted the edges down with rocks. When the afternoon temps are in the high 90’s I can expect the herbs to take a day and a half to dry. Now that things are a tad cooler it is taking about 2 and a half days.


Here they are after they sat out all weekend. We had a busy weekend and they sat outside a little longer than I liked, so the color washed out a bit.

Usually the basil is still a bright green, but being in the sun so long bleached them. The sent and flavor is still good.

Parsley

Chamomile

I have been storing them in old jars that I have been collecting.

I think they look rather pretty

I have been putting the jars in my pantry where it is cool and dark to preserve color and flavor

It has been kind of fun collection and preserving my herbs, I plan to do more next year.

There are many different ways to dry and store herbs. You can use a dehydrator or tie them in a bunch and hang them upside down . Some people will freeze their fresh herbs in ice cube trays, or just freeze them in zip lock baggies. There are many different methods, and they all are very rewarding.